by Otsuichi
After I had clasped my hands, Morino’s grandparents sat me down in the living room and asked what their granddaughter was like at school. Before I could begin to answer, they were telling stories about what Morino had been like as a child. I assumed they had no interest in anything I had to say.
“Oh, right, we have some pictures she drew in elementary school!” her grandmother exclaimed happily, standing up and vanishing into the back.
The grandfather watched her go, and then he bowed his head to me apologetically. “My wife’s getting a little carried away, I’m afraid.”
I shook my head—a generic reaction seemed appropriate.
“Yoru has never really brought any friends home, you see. When we heard you were coming, she got excited.”
Morino’s grandmother came back in carrying a paper bag, which she set down on the table before pulling from it a number of pages of old drawing paper—pictures Morino had drawn in elementary school using paint and crayon. I had guessed as much from her maps, but Morino appeared to have no artistic talent at all.
On the back of the pages were names and grades.
Some of these were drawn by Yuu. Their drawings had been kept together. There were drawings with Yoru’s name from first through sixth grade, but Yuu’s were only for first and second. This fact really drove home the truth that there had been a girl here named Yuu who was no more.
I compared drawings the two of them had done in second grade.
“You can hardly tell what either one of them was trying to draw, can you?” the grandmother said, beaming. There was no difference in the twins’ artistic ability. But they had been attempting the same subject, and they had produced similar drawings.
Both pictures featured a symbolic representation of a cross section of a house, in the middle of which two girls with long hair stood next to each other. Presumably, those girls were themselves.
“I wonder what they’re doing,” the grandmother said.
“Standing in the house?” the grandfather replied.
“I suppose,” she laughed.
I said nothing, but I knew what they had been drawing. There was a red line around each of the girl’s necks, connected to the ceiling. These were drawings of them playing at hanging themselves in the shed.
“They drew those pictures during summer vacation in second grade, for homework. Yuu was supposed to take that picture to school when vacation ended, but … they drew it just a few days before Yuu died.” She smiled fondly at the memory.
There was not much difference between the pictures, but Yuu’s was a little more detailed. In hers, a red line wound around the beam above, boxes were stacked on top of each other, and the sun shone above the house. And there were the shoes they wore.
In Yoru’s picture, none of this was drawn in any detail; it was colored very simply, or possibly boldly. The legs were flesh colored all the way down, with no attempt at shoes. The background was all dark gray.
My attention focused on the shoes in Yuu’s picture. One girl was wearing black shoes, and the other was wearing white ones. I wasn’t sure if there was any meaning to that, but I decided to make note of it.
I put the picture back down on the table.
“I’d better take those photos,” I said, and I went outside, carrying my digital camera.
When I opened the door, though, everything looked white. At first, I thought it was mist, but it was merely drizzle—tiny drops all over the mountains. It wasn’t the kind of rain that made it worth using an umbrella, so I wandered around in it, snapping pictures at random. After I’d done that for a while, it started to rain harder.
Eventually, I pretended to randomly find my way to the shed.
The shed door was made of wood. It was closed, and I couldn’t see inside. I could hear rain pounding on the tarp on the roof. I grabbed the door handle and opened it. It was a little stiff, but it opened.
The light slanting in through the entrance lit the interior hazily. It smelled of dried plants.
It was about six and a half feet tall and about ten by thirteen across. The floor was dirt, almost clay.
There was a beam near the ceiling, under the half-broken roof. There were a number of holes in it, and I could see the blue of the tarp though them. A single light hung down.
In the story, there had been a dog here, but there wasn’t anymore. It must have died. There was a small door cut in the wall next to the door, presumably for the dog. The dog must have been tied up next to that.
I stepped inside. The air in the room seemed to quiver. It was slightly damp and a little chilly.
Once, Yuu had been there, hanging from the ceiling beam. It felt like the dead little girl was still hanging there.
There was a switch next to the entrance. I flipped it, and the light turned on. It was a very dim bulb that illuminated very little.
I remembered everything Yoru had told me: two boxes piled on the ground with the girls on top, about to hang themselves … the bleach they had mixed into the food for the dog they kept in there.
I had my doubts about Yoru’s version of how Yuu had died.
Yoru had known her sister was already dead when she’d opened the shed door; she’d only pretended that she’d just discovered it at that moment.
Why had she needed to do that? What would make her want to hide that? The more I thought about ir, the more I felt like she must have had something to do with her sister’s death.
“We found Yuu here.”
I turned around and found Morino’s grandmother standing in the entrance. She peered gravely into the shed, gazing slightly upward.
“I heard she died trying to surprise everyone.”
I turned to look at the same place her gaze was fixed. That must have been where Yuu was found.
It was raining really hard now. I could hear it pounding on the ground. But inside the shed, it felt like all the sounds outside were muffled, even the rain hitting the tarp above us and the wind rushing past.
Drops of water slipped through the hole in the roof, which had been broken in a storm and had never been repaired. But there was almost nothing in the shed, so the water did no harm.
To one side were farming hoes and spades, even a scythe leaning against the wall, plus pruning shears and a thick roll of coarse rope.
There were several different kinds of cord next to the dog’s door, left there even after the dog had died. There were several different colors, but my eyes were attracted to the red one.
“I remember it so clearly,” Morino’s grandmother said quietly. “I came back from a neighbor’s, and I was putting my umbrella away. Yoru was standing in the entrance …”
Her version was the same as what Yoru had told me. When Yoru had seen the bag of pears, she’d gone to call her sister. She’d opened the shed door and screamed. There was one thing about the story that bothered me; before I could ask about it, though, I felt something strange underfoot.
My feet were sticking to the ground. The floor was made of clay, so when it rained, the water leaking from the ceiling moistened everything, making the ground soft and sticky.
I lifted my foot and felt my shoe peel away from the ground. A film of mud remained attached to my sole.
It had been raining the day Yuu died. The ground must have been like this. But the footprint I’d left behind was not very deep, and the twins had been children, weighing a lot less than I did. Were they heavy enough to leave footprints?
I looked out through the open door. It was raining hard. If it had been raining longer than it had today, the floor of the shed would have been wetter still, so the girls might have left footprints.
It had started raining around noon the day Yuu died. Yuu had gone into the shed shortly afterward, and Yoru said she had stayed inside. When she found the body, Yoru said she had seen it from the shed door.
If Morino’s grandmother had seen Yoru’s footprints inside the shed, then the story I’d been told at the bus stop was a lie. If Yoru’s footprints had
been in the shed, then that would prove she’d been there before she supposedly found the body.
“When you found Yuu, were there any footprints on the ground?”
It seemed unlikely the grandmother would remember such a trivial detail, but I asked anyway.
“Yuu’s footprints, yes,” Morino’s grandmother said. The box she’d been standing on had been knocked on its side; when the grandmother had gone to pick it up, she’d seen child-sized footprints on the ground.
Oh well, I thought. It was only natural that Yuu’s footprints were on the ground.
“You could tell they were Yuu’s footprints at a glance?”
“Those girls looked exactly the same, so we told them apart by their shoes. Yoru wore black shoes, and Yuu wore white. They had different soles, and the ones on the floor of the shed were definitely Yuu’s.”
I remembered the picture Yuu had drawn. It made sense. They must have been Yuu’s shoes then. Yuu had been found hanging from the ceiling, barefoot, with her white shoes placed on the ground next to her. As with many suicides, she had lined her shoes up neatly next to her.
“There were no signs of Yoru’s footprims?” I asked, just to be sure.
Morino’s grandmother nodded, wondering why I had even asked. Yoru had not stepped inside after finding the body. Her footprints were nowhere to be found. Only one child’s footprints were in the shed.
“Is the rope that was tied around Yuu’s chest still around?”
Morino’s grandmother shook her head. She seemed to have forgotten all about it. “Anyway, you’d better stay here for the night. It’s raining very hard.”
I thought about it and nodded.
We left the shed and went back into the house. Morino’s grandmother told me a number of places that would make for good photographs.
“I hope the weather’s better tomorrow,” she said.
As I took off my shoes, I noticed a little plastic toy among the objects on the shoe box. When I picked it up, I discovered it was a little flower brooch, the kind you get as a prize in a candy box, of a very cheap color and design.
Which of them had owned this? Looking at it, I was reminded again that they had lived here when they were very young.
The brooch in hand, I looked down the long hallway into the house. Morino’s grandmother had already gone into the living room and was out of sight.
I stood there thinking.
In my mind’s eye, the two doll-like twin girls from the photograph were walking down the hallway toward me, whispering to each other and gravely thinking about how they could next pretend to be dead. In my imagination, they went all the way to the end of the hall and turned the corner. Trying to follow them, I took off my shoes and stepped up into the house. I looked around the corner where they had vanished, but of course, there was nothing there—just a quiet, dark space at the end of the dimly lit corridor.
iv
On Monday, Morino was clearly glancing sideways at me, wondering. She obviously wanted to ask what I’d been up to in the country. But I spent the entire day pretending not to notice her gaze.
I didn’t speak to her until all the other students had left the room after the final class of the day. A few students had suggested I walk home with them, but I ignored their requests—which is not to say that I didn’t respond. Without any conscious participation on my part, my mind created some believable excuse, smoothly deflecting their invitations. I had no idea what excuses I’d made. I had no interest in my classmates whatsoever, and such interactions were always carried out automatically, allowing me to live without making waves.
Finally, the sound of my classmates’ footsteps faded, and the hall outside the room grew quiet. Only Morino and I remained. She was hunched over in her seat like a sinking ship, glaring sidelong at me.
I slowly crossed the quiet classroom toward her seat. She sat three rows from the window, three rows from the back.
“I hear you spent the night in the country. My grandmother called to tell me about it,” Morino said sleepily. The lines under her eyes had grown worse.
“She’s a good cook.”
I sat down in the seat in front of her, sideways, with the row of windows in front of me. It was still light out, and the sky was only slightly yellowed. In the distance, I could hear some sports team running and calling out as they did. The lights in the room were off, and the only illumination in the room was pouring through these windows.
“I heard a number of things at the house where you once lived.”
“For example?”
“The pranks you and your sister pulled as children. That Yoru would never cry no matter how much they scolded her, but that Yuu always cried instantly, hiding behind her sister.”
“She always depended on me.”
We sat in silence for a long moment. There was a quiet tension in the air. I looked at her again.
“I’ve figured out a number of things about Morino Yuu. I’m not sure about every detail, but …”
Morino stopped glaring at me. She slowly looked away, closing her eyes. Her lashes seemed to tremble above the dark lines under her eyes.
“I thought you might,” she said bitterly. She asked me what I had figured out.
“Yuu died when she was eight, nine years ago now,” I said. Morino did not open her eyes. “Nine years ago, that day, you found her body hanging in the shed, and you went to tell your grandmother. But you’d known there was a body in there already. You’d been waiting in the entrance for someone to come home so you could pretend to discover your sister’s death while someone was watching.”
I stopped, waiting for Morino’s reaction. She was silent for a moment and then she asked if that was all.
“You already knew your sister was dead. But you were acting, trying to hide that fact. When I try to imagine what would make you do something like that, I always come to one conclusion. In other words, you had something to do with your sister’s death.”
Morino nodded.
I continued. “Yuu had tied two ropes to the ceiling beam, one around her neck and the other under her arms, supporting her body.”
The little eight-year-old girl had jumped off the wooden box. For a moment, it must’ve looked like she was hanging from the rope around her neck. But in fact, the rope around her chest was keeping her from falling too far.
Then another girl appeared, a girl with the same face. That girl took the pruning shears from the wall and went over to the girl hanging from the ceiling. She cut the rope around the girl’s chest with the shears.
The rope broke, and this time the girl was hanging from the rope around her neck.
“You killed her.”
Morino opened her eyes a little, not looking at me—not looking at anything for long.
“Didn’t you hear about the footprints? My footprints were nowhere in the room.”
I imagined the girl hanging there barefoot. The ground in the shed had been softened by the rain.
“No, you left footprints all over the shed. But nobody knew the truth. After you cut the rope and killed her, you saw your own footprints on the ground. And you knew you couldn’t just walk away without arousing suspicion. You had to do something …”
Morino had looked up at the hanged corpse she’d made and down at the footprints on the ground, knowing she was in trouble. Then she saw the shoes that were placed next to each other on the ground, and she made up her mind.
She took off her own shoes, stepping onto a fallen box. Careful not to leave any more footprints, she put on the shoes that had been placed under the corpse, replacing them with her own.
Now the footprints belonged to the dead girl.
“All you had to do then was slip out through the dog door. The ground was still dry there, and you wouldn’t leave any footprints.”
Morino finally opened her eyes and looked at me. “And my motive?”
“Hatred,” I said.
Morino looked very sad. “When you said you’d ‘figured out a number
of things about Morino Yuu,’ I knew you’d caught me.”
I nodded.
It had baffled me: Why had her grandmother been so sure it was Yoru standing there when she’d opened the front door? They were twins, and they looked exactly alike—nobody could tell them apart at a glance.
But if she had been wearing black shoes, then it would’ve been obvious.
“lt must’ve been hard to go nine years without telling anyone, Morino Yuu.” That was Morino’s real name.
†
A group of girls went down the hall laughing merrily.
Morino Yuu listened to them for a moment, until their voices faded and the hall was silent again.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m the younger sister. I was the one who was always crying, always ordered around.” She frowned, looking at me. “How did you know?”
“Yuu didn’t know that people take off their shoes when they hang themselves. That made it all clear. When you were playing at suicide, Yoru might’ve told you, but I imagine you forgot.”
I told her about the pictures I’d seen in the house, the pictures they’d drawn of themselves playing at hanging.
“Those pictures were drawn during summer vacation nine years ago, just before Yoru’s death—which means whatever can be gleaned about the artist’s personality at the time is also true about her personality on the day Yoru died.”
Yoru and Yuu had drawn the same thing, but there had been a number of differences: In Yuu’s picture, both girls had been wearing shoes. But in Yoru’s picture, the girls’ legs had been flesh toned all the way down. At first, I’d thought Yuu had drawn more details—but later, I changed my mind.
I began to think that Yoru had drawn the picture correctly, from memory. Yuu had drawn the sun, but Yoru’s picture had a gray background—further evidence. At the bus stop, Morino had told me the hanging game had happened on a rainy day. It was not that Yoru had forgotten to draw the shoes—it was simply that they had both been barefoot.
“You said it yourself at the bus stop: you knew more about death than Yuu did; you were much crueler than she was. You were saying that as Yoru; so as a child, Yoru must have known about the strange custom of people taking off their shoes before hanging themselves.”